


xix. broken hearts

by tempestaurora



Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [19]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (Which is basically what the umbrella academy is anyway), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bonding, Family, Gen, References to Previous Child Abuse, Sibling Bonding, Vanya's a Ghost, Whumptober, references to murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27105052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempestaurora/pseuds/tempestaurora
Summary: When Ben was thirteen, his sister died at the hands of his father.When Ben was thirteen, he ran away with his siblings, Five and Klaus, and the three of them bundled up in a junker at the scrapyard and left enough room for Vanya’s ghost to sit with them through the night.When Ben was thirteen, he waited daily for the announcement of his disappearance.When Ben was thirteen, three weeks after running away, they were reported to the police.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & The Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Ben Hargreeves
Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1930186
Comments: 56
Kudos: 315





	xix. broken hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts: Grief | Mourning a Loved One
> 
> so i wrote this all today. because i thought i already had, and it turns out, i had not. this is the final instalment to "ghosts" - i don't have anything else planned for this universe! but it was a cute mini series and i'm glad i managed to find an ending to the story
> 
> enjoy!

When Ben was thirteen, his sister died at the hands of his father. When Ben was thirteen, he ran away with his siblings, Five and Klaus, and the three of them bundled up in a junker at the scrapyard and left enough room for Vanya’s ghost to sit with them through the night. When Ben was thirteen, he made sure Klaus had enough to eat and Five wasn’t pushing himself too hard and Vanya felt included, even when that was difficult.

When Ben was thirteen, he spent three weeks living in the scrapyard with his brothers and ghost-sister, scrounging food and keeping their meagre positions safe. He was lookout for Five’s blinks in and out of bodegas, swiping sandwiches and bottles of water, until the string of odd bodega robberies hit the newspapers they used as blankets and they had to target a new neighbourhood instead.

When Ben was thirteen, he waited daily for the announcement of his disappearance. Surely, it would come alongside _Number Seven dead_ and _Numbers Four and Five_ missing. They checked the papers and watched the news through television store windows, their names never brought up until three weeks after they left, when The Umbrella Academy had a mission and only half the members arrived for it.

Numbers One, Two and Three stood proudly on the steps of the town hall, and Dad said in that gruff voice of his, _The mission didn’t call for the full force of The Umbrella Academy. Numbers One to Three were deemed able to handle this themselves,_ before he forced them away from the cameras and into that familiar black car. When it hit the papers a day later, Ben tore out the photo of his left-behind siblings, and placed it between the pages of one of Vanya’s language textbooks, hidden and safe. One, Two and Three, who wouldn’t believe their father would be capable of killing their little sister.

When Ben was thirteen, three weeks after running away, they were reported to the police.

It was the scrapyard’s owner who’d seen them a few times, playing around the junk cars and heavy machinery and tried to scare them off. He must’ve eventually realised that they weren’t _playing,_ they were _living,_ and called the police and Child Protective Services to take them in.

Five suggested running, but then Klaus cried because none of them had showered in three weeks and they hadn’t had a real meal that wasn’t stolen since then either, so Five backed down, and the three of them were taken into custody and settled in a pleasantly blue hallway in a tall office building, awaiting their turn in the office.

They refused to leave each other’s sides, so they went in together, and the social worker brought in another chair so they’d all fit.

“You’re… _brothers,_ ” she clarified, sending a special look towards Ben, his features very different from his siblings’, and the three of them nodded. “Where are your parents?” They looked between each other.

“We’re not safe at home,” Five informed her, his voice crystal clear and as authoritative as he could manage. “So we left and we’re not going back.”

The social worker nodded carefully, eyed them each in turn, and then asked a million questions. Hours must’ve passed in that room as Five relented and told her about Reginald Hargreeves, about reading his diary and finding that their little sister had been killed by him, about the harsh training and nights in the mausoleum, throwing up in the training room and sordid secrets The Umbrella Academy had hidden.

She seemed over her head at the very least, but by the end of the conversation, she’d called in her manager and informed him of the situation, and then called in the police and had all three of them provide statements, and then cried a little when she thought they couldn’t see her, maybe over the subject as a whole, but Ben thought it was because she realised that Klaus was once The Séance, and that meant he could see the ghost of his sister, following him along forever.

When Ben was thirteen, they were put into foster care.

The police officer told him it was like witness protection. They were given the last name _Miller_ and told that they had to stay quiet about who they once were, just in case their father came to take them back. They were placed in a group home, with four other children, and after Ben cried every night for a week straight, and Klaus had a freak-out when one of them brushed past him on the staircase, Five told the foster parents that they’d just come from one house of seven children; they were not ready to be in another.

After that, they were moved to a house of foster parents with no children. It was the three brothers and the ghost of Vanya, and they stayed like that for a while, out in upstate New York, away from the city.

Ben read the newspaper daily, watched the evening news with his foster mother Eliza, and waited for the report that Reginald Hargreeves was being charged with murder and child abuse.

The report never came.

When Ben was fourteen, their foster parents, Eliza and Laura, were given the all-clear to send them to school. Real school. _Public_ school. Their education for the half-year prior had been spotty at best, though they were well ahead of their grade with the intensive studies they’d been put through all the years before.

The three of them were initially enrolled into freshman year in their town’s high school. Within a few weeks, they’d been bumped up a grade, and a few weeks after that, Five started taking AP classes just to keep himself entertained.

They made new friends, a few enemies, and received a healthy dose of detentions when their new enemies attempted to pounce on child heroes who hadn’t had a chance to fight in a long time. No one bugged them after that.

Benjamin, Klaus and Fievel Miller waited for the day their father would be arrested and their three remaining siblings would be brought to them, but it never came.

When Ben was fourteen, he picked up Vanya’s violin for the first time, and he started to learn.

When Ben was fifteen, he told his therapist about the way Klaus was itching and twitching, getting distracted in class with all the ghosts that swamped him. He told his therapist he was worried, because Klaus had stolen from Laura’s cabinet of expensive whiskeys and swiped money from Eliza’s purse to buy weed from the kids at school who dealt behind the gym block, and he only seemed okay when he was not sober.

Klaus was angry at first, but when his therapist started working with him on managing the ghosts, whether it was through medication or meditation, he seemed to forgive Ben after all.

When Ben was sixteen, he got his driver’s license and then almost immediately crashed the car. He was flung through the windshield because he was the kind of boy who sometimes didn’t think to wear his seatbelt, and Five, in the passenger seat, blinked to a safe spot, only to watch the tentacles rip out of Ben’s chest after three years of being caged, and cocoon his teenage body to save his life.

When Ben was sixteen, he had to go to hospital anyway, because of the head wound and the broken collar bone, and he watched Laura and Eliza sprint through the emergency room to find him, Klaus on their heels, and he realised he’d never been loved by a parent like this.

When Ben was seventeen, The Umbrella Academy saved the world from a megalomaniac of a supervillain on the same day he and his brothers graduated from high school. They watched the news before their graduation house party at a friends’ place kicked off, and Klaus muttered, “Couldn’t even let us have the day.”

Five flung his arm around Klaus’ shoulders, and then did the same to Ben on his other side. He’d been valedictorian and his speech had been brief and hopeful. “They can’t take shit away from us,” he said.

“Vanya said _Swear Jar,_ ” Klaus replied.

Five rolled his eyes. “Vanya can kiss my ass.”

“Vanya said _Swear Jar_ again.”

When Ben was seventeen, he and Five started their Harvard degrees from Eliza and Laura’s kitchen dining table. Klaus went out and got a job, claiming further education didn’t vibe with him, and the three of them were sat down on a Wednesday night to be told that now they were functionally adults, they deserved to understand what happened with the police report they filed on Reginald Hargreeves at thirteen years old.

When Ben was seventeen, he found out that the police had searched The Umbrella Academy mansion and found no evidence of a seventh bedroom, no evidence of a seventh child, no evidence of even the coffin that they’d _seen_ _with their own eyes_ on the day of the funeral. Reginald Hargreeves had scrubbed Vanya clean from the records, had scrubbed her clean from the face of the planet. The only proof of her existence were the memories and her ghost, and neither of them could be verified.

“What about the child endangerment?” Five asked, his voice making that sound that seemed precariously close to a sob planning to break free.

Eliza sighed. “They said there wasn’t enough evidence. None of your siblings would speak a word against him; they couldn’t find the video footage or the notebook. You provided the pages you’d torn out of his notebook, but they couldn’t find the book itself to verify.”

“The police had been trying to make a child endangerment case since The Umbrella Academy debuted at that bank robbery,” Laura added. “Nothing sticks because Hargreeves _won’t let it._ ”

When Ben was seventeen, he and his brothers raged in Five’s bedroom until they’d got it all out of their systems.

Five huffed, “Why the hell didn’t they tell us sooner?”

Ben replied, “Because we were kids, Five. Fragile _kids._ ”

“They only ever wanted what was best for us,” Klaus agreed. “Even if that meant leaving us in limbo like that.”

Ben sniffed. “Is Vanya okay?”

Klaus spared a glance to the desk chair. “She’s sad,” was all he said.

“I still wish they’d told us sooner.”

“Five—”

“No.” He stood up. “Maybe we could’ve done something—”

“Done _what?_ ”

“Saved the others.”

When Ben was seventeen, they fell silent.

“You didn’t want to save the others—”

“I was thirteen. I was an idiot. They’re our _siblings_ —”

“And they’re fine where they are,” Klaus interrupted. “They knew running away was possible. _We_ managed it—”

“Unless he told them that we were dead, too.”

Ben shared a glance with Klaus, then shook his head. “If we had gone to rescue them as kids, we would’ve failed. Probably _would_ have ended up dead if Dad— _Reginald_ had anything to do with it. This was the best we could’ve gotten, Five. We got a normal teenage upbringing, and now—”

“Now, what? We just grow up and go to Harvard and pretend our siblings aren’t still in that hellhole?”

Klaus flopped back onto Five’s bed. “If they had left with us,” he said, “the world might’ve ended by now.”

“Reginald always was obsessed with that,” Ben agreed. “Never stopped talking about the apocalypse.”

When Ben was eighteen, they packed up their things and moved away. They rented out a three-bedroom apartment, and Klaus got a job waiting tables, Five a job delivering pizzas (he had the fastest delivery time of the team, and he truthfully didn’t even own a car), Ben a job in a grocery store.

They studied for their degrees and kept their eyes out for Umbrella Academy news, and Ben played the violin in the evenings as the sun dipped low over the rooftops. The apartment always went silent when he played, and when he was done he’d look over his shoulder and see Five ducking back into his room, and Klaus watching a spot on the couch, where Vanya was no doubt curled up, listening.

Then he might say something like, “She’d love to hear something by Vivaldi,” and vanish into his bedroom too, leaving Ben to play alone in the living room to the ghost he couldn’t see.

When Ben was nineteen, his first real girlfriend broke up with him. She said it was because he was “too secretive”. Five laughed when he told him that and Klaus snorted into his drink.

“Oh, go ahead,” he said, “tell her all about our childhood as superheroes to an abusive, murderous father, and the eldritch horror that lives in your chest. Then she’d _beg_ for you to keep a few things to yourself.”

When Ben was twenty, Five leapt over the back of the sofa and landed heavily beside Ben. He said, “Let’s talk time travel,” and Ben said, “Only if we’re talking hypotheticals.”

When Ben was twenty-one, several days after he and Five graduated, Klaus dropped a glass and his hands flashed blue and it stopped in mid-air.

“What the fuck,” Klaus breathed.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Ben said.

“What the everloving fuck?” Five asked, and the three of them stared at the floating glass, as it rose back up and settled on the counter. “Since when did you have telekinesis?”

Klaus’ eyes flashed wide. “Telekinesis? Oh, you can’t—that wasn’t telekinesis. That was _Vanya._ ”

When Ben was twenty-one, Klaus discovered he could make ghosts tangible.

When Ben was twenty-two, Klaus discovered he could make ghosts _visible._

It was the same night that they’d been to see Allison Hargreeves in her debut movie. It was some massive blockbuster, and Ben had to admit that she could act, that she had grown up beautiful, that she had finally seen sense and left the mansion. The three of them watched the movie and then walked home in silence.

As soon as they crossed the threshold they were talking, all at once, a messy chatter of _I cannot believe—how long do you think—what about Diego? And Luther?_ until they were all worked up and in various stages of confused and angry. _She didn’t reach out—how would she even find us—we’re the fucking Millers, she wouldn’t know that—_ and then they were hugging, because Ben and Klaus were the tactile kind, even if Five wasn’t.

Klaus’ hands glowed blue, as they often did in group hugs, and a fourth body seemed to join in, completely invisible, strangely real. She had no _feel_ to her, in this state, but sometimes Klaus brought her forth and let her feel them, as she apparently could—but this time it went further, and as Ben turned his head he yelped and found himself face-to-face with a young woman with brown hair whom he’d never seen before.

But, of course, he _had_ seen her before.

“Vanya?”

“Vanya!”

She laughed so hard she cried, and so did the rest of them, together and visible and mostly whole, even in the face of everything else.

When Ben was twenty-three, Diego Hargreeves made the news.

If they hadn’t made the risk of moving back to New York, perhaps it never would have even reached them. But they had, and they’d found a place in the city, three-bedrooms because they still didn’t know what it was to be apart, and that’s how ten years after they left The Umbrella Academy, Diego Hargreeves’ face was on the six-o-clock news as the hero cop who saved a woman’s life.

“He’s a cop,” Ben said.

“Of course he is,” Klaus replied.

“Always did have a hero complex,” Five agreed.

Still, when Ben was twenty-three, he snooped around Diego’s precinct, watched him park his car from the sidewalk, laughing with the woman who must be his partner. Only— _the other kind of partner,_ he decided, when they caught hands and smiled with soft eyes, heading into the police station.

He came back often, just to see Diego pass. Maybe if he were in L.A., he would’ve done the same thing with Allison; maybe he would’ve found her house and stared up at the windows, been front row at all her red carpets. But he was in New York, and so this is what he did: he watched Diego from afar, kept up with news of Luther as the last remaining Umbrella Academy student and, eventually, made contact.

When Ben was twenty-four, he wrote a letter a hundred times until the words were right. He then approached a cop outside the precinct and said, “Hey, could you pass this to Officer Hargreeves?”, before leaving without much else said. Then he waited in a booth at Griddy’s as the dark washed over the city, hood up in the corner as he watched an old green car park in the parking lot, and a long-lost Diego Hargreeves step out.

He hadn’t signed the card with his name. Just, _your brother._ He had four of them; it was vague enough.

He watched Diego survey the donut place, walk over to the door, push it open, and—

Ben lost his nerve and ran out the back.

When Ben was twenty-five, Eliza and Laura delivered a box of their old things to their apartment. They had a new group of foster children now, but Ben, Klaus and Five were always their firsts, always their sons. They ate dinner and after they were gone, Ben rummaged through the books and toys Eliza and Laura thought they’d want.

Ben stopped at one of Vanya’s old language textbooks from the Academy and flipped it open. Stuck between the pages was an old slip of torn newspaper, a grainy photo in black and white: Numbers One, Two and Three standing outside town hall after their first mission without their siblings.

He carefully pinned the photo onto his noticeboard and said to his brothers, “I think we should write a book.”

When Ben was twenty-six, he and his brothers dropped the name _Miller_ that had been cloaking them for over a decade, and stole back _Hargreeves_ for themselves. They posed for the photos, spoke calmly at the interviews, diligently signed every presented hardback.

When Ben was twenty-six, he and his brothers published _The Forgotten Children of The Umbrella Academy,_ and stepped back out into the spotlight they used to be drowned in. Only now they commanded it, their heads above the water.

_Then there was Number Seven,_ Klaus had written, _a girl born with powers so strong they terrified our father. He stuffed her with pills, made her forget her strength, then killed her when it started forcing its way back. Her name was Vanya. Don’t you fucking forget it._

_The number system has always seemed fairly arbitrary,_ Five had written, _but I know now that it was anything but. Perhaps he numbered us at random, but the numbers were seeds of control for us all. Why was Luther Number One? Why was Vanya Number Seven? Why was I Number Five? Our numbers told us there was a natural order to things, even if it made no sense. It told us that Luther was in control, that Diego was his right-hand, even when neither knew how to lead._

_I sometimes stand outside the mansion still,_ Ben had written, _and stare up at the windows that I used to spend hours at. As a child, I was caged, always looking out at the real world and desperate to reach it, and now, as an adult, I am somehow always wanting to go back inside, to see what has changed, to discover if there’s a new crop of superpowered children, imprisoned and dying to get out._

When Ben was twenty-six, he and his brothers were interviewed on live television; primetime. After five minutes of questions, the interviewer said, “In books like these, proving your claims is such a big part of it; such a core aspect to the memoir. Now, I’ve done some research, and a source at the NYPD tells me that you three made a report at thirteen years old that your father had killed your sister, Number Seven, and yet, the police found nothing. What do you think about that, now?”

“It’s impressive,” Five replied, earning an intrigued look from the interviewer. “He managed to erase an entire person from existence. We were _at_ her funeral, we saw the coffin, so where is her body? I’ve _been_ in her bedroom, I’ve _sat_ at the dinner table with her, I’ve _seen_ her with my own eyes – it’s impressive that he managed to erase everything tangible. I mean, less so than if he’d ever actually told anyone about a seventh child, or ever let us outside or to speak to other human beings—”

“It becomes less and less impressive, huh?” Ben laughed, and Five shot him a grin.

“I’m still incredibly interested in him _removing_ an entire bedroom from that house. I’d kill to know how he did that.”

“But the burden of proof is still on you all,” the interviewer said, “is it not? You’ve made _many_ claims in your book. Are you not afraid of Sir Hargreeves coming after you for libel?”

“Firstly,” Klaus said, holding up a single finger, “that would involve him willingly entering the same room as us, which he has never wanted to do in all twenty-six years we’ve been alive. And secondly,” he held up the second, “we _have_ proof that Vanya existed.”

“You do?”

He grinned a crooked smile, rolling his eyes at his brothers. “How quickly people forget about my incredible and amazing powers.”

When Ben was twenty-six, the world saw Vanya Hargreeves, Number Seven, appear in her ghostly form, looking as if she had grown up, short and pale and softly pretty, even in death.

When Ben was twenty-six, the inquiry into Reginald Hargreeves was reopened.

When Ben was twenty-six, Diego Hargreeves showed up on their doorstep with a copy of their book and said, “You left the donut place before I could meet you.”

Ben had written about it in the book. He nodded. He said, “I lost the nerve.”

Diego grinned, and pulled Ben into a hug. “Thank god you found it again.”

When Ben was twenty-six, Luther Hargreeves, who had not gone to the moon in this universe, who had not been turned into an ape, but ran when he couldn’t take the loneliness anymore and found a new family in the fire fighters he worked with, showed up on their doorstep with a copy of their book and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

And Klaus who had opened the door, grinned wide and said, “I’m sorry, too. Want to come in?”

When Ben was twenty-six, Allison Hargreeves showed up on their doorstep with a copy of their book and said, “I know you probably don’t want me here—”

And Five, rolling his eyes as he went, opened the door wider, tugged her inside and said, “Get over yourself, sis. You want to stay for dinner?”

When Ben was twenty-six, the seven Umbrella Academy children stood in the same room. Most of them cried. The ones who didn’t just did it later, when no one could see.

When Ben was twenty-seven, Reginald Hargreeves was arrested, and then vanished from his cell entirely, never to be seen again.

When Ben was twenty-seven, he met Allison’s little girl, Claire, and Diego’s wife, Eudora. They hosted a big meal and invited down Eliza and Laura; they all sat around a cramped table that could not fit eleven, and sent a sledgehammer through the past fourteen years, as if the time and distance had never kept them apart.

When Ben was thirteen, his sister died at the hands of his father.

When Ben was twenty-seven, that crack in his heart patched itself up, and he felt himself become whole.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!!! pretty please talk to me in the comments!! this was like a 2 hour burst of forced inspiration and writing when i had planned to work on an assignment, but i'm glad it's done
> 
> the "ghosts" mini series is also complete now!! this is where that story ends, though i am endlessly interested in things like luther being a fire fighter (or diego), the siblings having GOOD relationships in adulthood, klaus just making vanya as a ghost appear on live television to prove that she died
> 
> also i planned to write in that allison had, at some point in her professional career, at like 22 or something, brought up her missing siblings and reminded the world that they did in fact exist at some point, even though they were just never mentioned past age 13, but i couldn't fit it in lmao
> 
> tomorrow: five & mr pennycrumb are HERE


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